psychoanalysis
Saskia Baron
Shirley is one of those films that the mood you’re in when you watch it will dictate whether you think it’s a great psychological horror movie or overheated and pretentious. Go to the cinema wanting to be plunged into a fever dream of gothic Americana, replete with glaucous close ups of Elisabeth Moss as a writer wreaking revenge on her unfaithful husband, and you’ll be more than satisfied. But if you’re hoping for a linear narrative that adheres to the actual biography of Shirley Jackson, the artful elliptical editing which blurs elements from her fiction with cherry-picked aspects of Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone expecting, as I was, a reverend and slightly earnest miniseries about Sigmund Freud's early professional years will be in for a surprise, and mostly in a good way. This, in short, is horror-schlock directed by Austrian specialist in the genre Martin Kren, made superior by acting and cinematography on a level with that to be found in the rather closer-to-history Babylon Berlin, a literate script by Stefan Brunner and Benjamin Hessler that's done its homework on the fledgling psychoanalyst's work in 1890s Vienna and above all a visceral quality which makes all the blood and grotesquerie Read more ...
Owen Richards
Don’t do drugs, kids. For the past 50 years, that’s been the consistent message. But how much of what we know about psychedelics is just fearmongering? Do you really want to jump out of a window? Will you permanently lose your mind? To find out the truth behind the campaigns, writer Donick Cary dives into the real-life trips of a gaggle of famous faces for this multicoloured Netflix documentary.When you think of rock stars on drugs, you might imagine tragic scenes of excess and overdose. It’s unlikely you picture Sting birthing a cow while tripping on Mexican peyote. But this farcical tableau Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
With influences as diverse as Hitchcock’s Vertigo to 2010’s Catfish, Safy Nebbou’s genre-splicing French-language feature, starring Juliette Binoche, comes loaded with a heady mix of cheap thrills and surprising psychological depth. And it’s a hoot from start to finish. Nebbou’s sixth and most accomplished feature is an adaptation of Camille Lauren’s 2016 novel, ‘Celle que vous croyez’. Binoche is Claire, a fifty-something literature professor, with two children from a failed marriage. We meet her being interviewed by a psychiatrist, Doctor Bormans (Nicole Garcia), the Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Roland Orzabal, co-founder and lead guitarist of Tears for Fears, laughs to himself often during this documentary — the latest in the BBC’s often-excellent, always-forensic Classic Albums series. “I agree, I agree, it sounds great,” says Orzabal. He’s listening to “Shout,” the band’s 1984 Billboard No. 1 hit. “There’s something about it,” he chuckles, “I believed it.” The documentary focuses on Orzabal and Curt Smith, Tears for Fears’ founders and frontmen, and the development of their album-topping record Songs From The Big Chair (1985). It tells the somewhat unlikely tale of how a cathartic Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Best-known for his TV series Legion and Fargo, director Noah Hawley makes the leap to the big screen with an existential space drama based on true events, starring Natalie Portman.During the Apollo 11 space mission, Michael Collins was left in the shuttle on the far side of the moon. While sat there, he reportedly said: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.” Such an awe-inspiring level of isolation in the vastness of space is an experience few humans will ever know. But what are the psychological effects of escaping terra firma, and how do you Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When he gave Martin Dysart, the troubled psychiatrist protagonist of Equus, a line in which he speaks about “moments of experience” being “magnetised”, Peter Shaffer might almost have been talking about theatre itself. It’s a phrase that comes close to catching what we feel when we're transfixed by the hard-to-predict coming-together of play, performance and production that marks the highpoints of drama. And “magnetic” is as good a word as any to describe the impact of Ned Bennett’s remarkable revival of Shaffer’s 1973 play for Theatre Royal Stratford East and English Touring Theatre, which Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Often the greatest works of dramatic absurdism spring from the worst extremes of human experience, whether it’s Ionesco’s Rhinoceros responding to fascism, or Havel’s The Garden Party satirising the irrational cruelties of Prague’s Soviet occupiers. In such dramas, absurdity becomes a powerful metaphor for the way totalitarian power seeks to undermine and warp reality, but in a work like The Glass Piano, in which absurdity is essentially a device for conveying the gently absurd, it’s less easy to see the point.The proposition is utterly fascinating: it’s based on the real life story of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Time was when the BBC Symphony Orchestra played austerely wholesome programmes of modern and romantic classics to third-full houses. Now on a more varied diet – such as the collaboration with Neil Gaiman and Alwyn's Miss Julie in concert announced this week for their forthcoming season – they pull in respectable audiences, though last night’s concert of classical, romantic and contemporary Austrians had a reassuringly old-fashioned feel about it.The orchestra itself has also been transformed under Sakari Oramo’s leadership, into one of the most flexible, up-for-anything large ensembles in the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Burning, which is the first film directed by the Korean master Lee Chang-dong since 2010’s Poetry, begins as the desultory story of a hook-up between a pair of poor, unmotivated millennials – the girl already a lost soul, the boy a wannabe writer saddled with a criminally angry father. The addition of a Porsche-driving third millennial with a swanky apartment in Seoul’s Gangnam District not only ramps up the tension between the two instantaneously but creates one of the most infernal romantic triangles in modern Asian cinema. Entering its third act, the movie morphs into a noir-steeped Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The privileges of writing reviews are very few (it’s certainly no way to make a living these days) but one that remains is the possibility of seeing a film before reading about it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter knowing in advance how a story will play out. It’s probably a good idea to let audiences know that they won’t get child-rearing tips from Rosemary’s Baby. But with Three Identical Strangers, a lot of its pleasure is in its narrative twists. To write about it critically is to risk dissipating the intricately paced revelations that make Tim Wardle’s documentary work so well. My advice Read more ...
Owen Richards
(Warning: spoilers ahead) For a brief 15 minutes, this was the biggest story in America: three boys, identical in looks, discovering each other at the age of 19. Edward “Eddie” Galland, David Kellman and Robert “Bobby” Shafran were all adopted from the same agency, but had no idea they were triplets. They were on the front cover of every magazine, guests on every talk show, and even had a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan. They talk the same, dress the same, smoke the same – it’s amazing!Then, as quickly as it came, the attention disappeared, but this was only the beginning of their story. Read more ...